You need a regular expression to match on wildcards like "*".
Adapt this to your situation.
The syntax is a bit weird because the letter immediately following "$user" is a word character and there has to be a way to tell where the $user variable stops and the "_ABC" begins.... 
use strict;
use warnings;

my $user_input = "abc";
my $regex = qr/${user_input}_ABC_.*pd/;

foreach my $file  (qw (abc abc_ABC_something.pdf  abc_ABC_anything.pdf
+))
{   
   next unless $file =~ /$regex/;
   print "$file is valid\n";
}

__END__
abc_ABC_something.pdf is valid
abc_ABC_anything.pdf is valid

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In reply to Re: searching files by Marshall
in thread searching files by michael99

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